[Piano break] It’s a town full of losers
And I’m pulling out of here to win
[3:40-3:48]

Some things undeniably hurt more – much more – than cars and girls.  But mouthwatering as Paddy McAloon’s attack on Bruce Springsteen was and remains, hindsight suggests that the named object of McAloon’s castigation might have been among the least deserving of the swathe of blow-dried rock offenders congesting radio airwaves at the time it was written.

While the inflated 1984 production values of Born In The U.S.A. may have given Springsteen his biggest commercial success, it also represents his last truly bombastic studio release for 23 years.  Though most of his subsequent albums continued to contain a smattering of straightforward rockers, few would have predicted at the dawn of the 1990s that Springsteen’s next big commercial success would be the Oscar-winning, minimalist lament The Streets Of Philadelphia or that the decade after 1995 would see The Boss release three acoustic folk albums.

Where Brucie’s dreams would soon turn to matters of more substance, those lesser mortals who swam in his wake in the Eighties – the preening prinnies and walking groins that made up the Van Halens, Bon Jovis, Motley Crues, Def Leppards and Guns’n’Roses of this parish – remained little more than hormone-fuelled cartoons from start to finish.

Rather than wishing ill on a songwriter whose work had always documented social realism amidst the drums and guitars, I’d like to think McAloon was railing more against the wider genre of formulaic AOR that provided the soundtrack to the “greed is good” culture of the mid- to late-Eighties (and which would be swept away by house, dance, R&B and rap).

While Born In The U.S.A. contains its share of cars and girls, re-examination suggests that the writer’s heart was barely engaged by either subject: a good number of the album’s songs were overtly political, while others are pale photocopies of the intense and urgent billets-doux Springsteen sent to lost loves a decade earlier.  Indeed, it’s entirely possible that the apolitical songs on the album such as Bobby Jean and No Surrender represent an extended farewell to long-time E Street Band member ‘Little’ Steven van Zandt, whose (initial) swansong as a band member the album represented.

Yet McAloon singled out Springsteen by name and, as an intelligent and thoughtful writer, he almost certainly did so for a reason.

Perhaps McAloon wanted to warn The Boss there is something unedifying and more than a little embarrassing about a greying man of 40 inviting a teenage woman to “wrap her legs around his velvet rims and strap her hands across his engines” (what Nick Hornby accurately calls the moment at which Springsteen “tips into Meat Loaf territory”).  You might just about be able to get away with that at 23, but…

Perhaps McAloon was warning Springsteen about the superannuated path down which he seemed to be heading.  By 1989 the Rolling Stones and The Who had already become little more than jokes, dissolving and reuniting as monetary considerations dictated, giving a grateful planet the spectacle of multi-millionaires in their mid-40s singing about how they hoped they died before they got old and couldn’t get any satisfaction.  Were Springsteen to continue to phone in anaemic Bobby Jeans another of the greatest beacons in pop history would fall into what the Minister calls the Death Or Glory Trap.  To quote that song by The Clash (and who wouldn’t, given the chance?):

I believe in this – and it’s been tested by research:
He who fucks nuns will later join the Church.

In other words: if you continue to play the percentage game, Bruce, your value to the suits will be mind-blowing but your real worth will be no more than the rest of the artistically exhausted Jaggers, Claptons and Townshends cranking out the same old shit 100 nights each year to pay for the Caribbean islands, coke habits and trout farms.

(And yes, that’s the same Clash who licensed Should I Stay Or Should I Go? to Levi Strauss…)

Rightly or wrongly I don’t, however, believe for one moment McAloon was suggesting either that Springsteen’s early records were anything other than great rock’n’roll albums or that cars and girls have no place in pop music – those subjects are, as Born To Run proves, the very foundations of the most successful artistic genre to emerge in the twentieth century.

If the pop genre came into being as music by teenagers(-ish) for teenagers, how could it possibly fail to reflect the twin obsessions of most 15-year-old boys (in America, at least)?  Indeed, the Minister would argue that (assuming they had been exposed to the work of the men in question) there was something unusual about a 15-year-old boy of his generation who didn’t believe that the real Holy Trinity was Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer and J. D. Salinger.

Perceived wisdom has it that the title track is the purest moment of pop genius on the Born To Run album.  Perceived wisdom is wrong.

The album’s finest moment breaks every rule about running orders by appearing as side one, track one.  Thunder Road is more than just the album’s lead song; it encapsulates the album’s entire message.  It is the first example of a song that could be considered a SMIP in its entirety, lasting four minutes and 48 seconds.

Unveiled live in February 1975 under the title Wings For Wheels, so crucial did Springsteen consider the song to the album’s structure his initial plans had two different versions of Thunder Road acting as a bookends both opening and closing the record.  The album’s concept was to feature a day in the life of a series of characters in the jungles of New Jersey, with an acoustic version of Thunder Road signifying morning and the full-band version closing the night’s proceedings.

The adjective most often applied to Thunder Road by reviewers is ‘cinematic’, appropriate insofar as it took its eventual title from a 1958 B-movie of the same name written by and starring Robert Mitchum.

Certainly, the song’s introduction – Springsteen’s laconic harmonica playing alongside Roy Bittan’s languid piano [0:00-0:15] – sets the tone for the story to be played out before us: we could not be anywhere else but America, the ubiquity of the instruments involved suggests we’re in a small American town, and the minor key and occasionally slack timing tell us that we are in for, at best, a bittersweet ride.

As Bittan’s timing solidifies and quickens for the introduction’s final two bars [0:15-0:18], the harmonica gives way to Springsteen’s voice.  Atop a pretty, gentle piano riff come arguably pop music’s greatest opening lines:

The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves.
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.
[0:18-0:31]

The screenplay is being written before our ears; the scene is set and we can hear the transistor radio to which Mary sways.  For the first and, I trust, only time the Minister cites with approval Jeremy Vine:

The first line is ‘The screen door slams’ – that’s the opening to a novel, an incredible first line! You’ve immediately got him, standing at the end of the garden path, and she’s come out, and the door shuts behind her.  Lyrically, that is the perfect opening to a song.

There is nothing new about Thunder Road’s story: it’s a simple tale of a man’s desperation to leave the small town that’s choking him and start over somewhere – anywhere – else as soon as he can, preferably in Mary’s company.

As Greil Marcus’s famous review of the Born To Run album for Rolling Stone magazine put it:

It is the drama that counts; the stories Springsteen is telling are nothing new, though no one has ever told them better or made them matter more.  Their familiar romance is half their power: the promise and the threat of the night; the lure of the road; the quest for a chance worth taking and the lust to pay its price; girls glimpsed once at 80 miles and hour and never forgotten; the city streets as the last, permanent American frontier.  We know the story: one thousand and one American nights, one long night of fear and love.

What is new is the majesty Springsteen and his band have brought to this story.  Springsteen’s singing, his words and the band’s music have turned the dreams and failures two generations have dropped along the road into an epic – an epic that began when that car went over the cliff in Rebel Without A Cause.  One feels that all it ever meant, all it ever had to say, is on this album, brought forth with a determination one would have thought was burnt out years ago.  One feels that the music Springsteen has made from this long story has outstripped the story; that it is, in all its fire, a demand for something new.

There is an overwhelming sense of recognition: no, you’ve never heard anything like this before, but you understand it instantly, because this music – or Springsteen crying, singing wordlessly, moaning over the last guitar lines of Born To Run, or the astonishing chords that follow each verse of Jungleland, or the opening of Thunder Road - is what rock & roll is supposed to sound like.

“Oh-oh, come take my hand,” Springsteen sings, “Riding out to case the promised land.”  And there, in a line, is Born To Run.  You take what you find, but you never give up your demand for something better because you know, in your heart, you deserve it.  That contradiction is what keeps Springsteen’s story, and the promised land’s, alive.  Springsteen took what he found and made something better himself.  This album is it.

The protagonist in Thunder Road, though, has a few years on the protagonist of Born To Run, the song:

Roy Orbison singing for the lonely -
Hey, that’s me and I want you only.
Don’t turn me home again,
I just can’t face myself alone again.
Don’t run back inside, darling:
You know just what I’m here for.
So you’re scared and you’re thinking
That maybe we ain’t that young anymore.
Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night.
You ain’t a beauty but, hey, you’re all right.
And that’s all right with me.
[0:32-1:11]

Not for this leading man any melodramatic declarations about wanting to die on the streets in an everlasting kiss.  Time is moving on and there isn’t enough left for further prevarication.  If he and Mary are to make their move, they’re going to have to do so tonight.

As the urgency of the moment intensifies, other instruments enter stage right.  Drummer Max Weinberg keeps time with bass drum, a fill and then snare rim through the next section, in which Springsteen’s own guitar finds it voice.  While not the SMIP, the next few seconds contain the loveliest use of reverse psychology, our champion’s call to action from Mary, ever laid down on tape:

You can hide ‘neath your covers
And study your pain,
Make crosses from your lovers,
Throw roses in the rain;
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a saviour to rise from these streets…
[1:14-1:27]

We’ve already made all the excuses; we’ve tried crossing our fingers and hoping for the best.  It hasn’t worked, so:

What else can we do now?
[1:38-1:40]

With the help of all but one of the rest of the E Street Band in full flight – Little Steven on backing vocals, Weinberg belting at his full drum kit, Garry Tallent on bass and Danny Federici’s glockenspiel – he answers his own question:

Except roll down the window
And let the wind blow back your hair!
Well, the night’s busting open -
These two lanes will take us anywhere.
We got one last chance to make it real,
To trade in these wings on some wheels:
Climb in back,
Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks.
Oh-oh, come take my hand,
We’re riding out tonight to case the promised land.
[1.41-2:16]

The song’s title gets its only mention, the “two lanes” referred to above now described as “lying out there like a killer in the sun” [2:22-2:25].  And then we learn a little more about the protagonist’s beautifully naive plan:

Well, I got this guitar
And I learned how to make it talk.
And my car’s out back
If you’re ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat:
The door is open but the ride it ain’t free.
And I know you’re lonely
For words that I ain’t spoken -
But tonight we’ll be free,
All the promises will be broken.
[2:38-3:05]

And then we hear our protagonist’s final reason why Mary should head with him for the city.  If a more bewitching lyrical passage exists in pop, I have yet to come across it (and I’m not sure I want to):

There were ghosts in the eyes
Of all the boys you sent away;
They haunt this dusty beach road
In the skeleton frames of burnt out Chevrolets.
They scream your name at night in the street,
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet.
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines roaring on,
But when you get to the porch they’re gone
On the wind.
[3:05-3:37]

Throughout these bars the band has taken down the intensity a couple of notches, the drums have momentarily fallen quiet, and our man makes his final plea:

So, Mary, climb in -
[3:38-3:40]

And then our SMIP: an enchanting descending scale of minor key piano chords from Roy Bittan, ramping up the tension and hinting at the story’s imminent resolution, allowing our protagonist to draw breath for his closing, roared statement of intent:

It’s a town full of losers
And I’m pulling out of here to win!
[3:40-3:48]

After all this, you’d think the band would be as spent as the listener.  Nothing of the sort.  It’s only here, with a full minute left, that the final member of the E Street Band, Clarence Clemons, exercises his saxophone’s reed and valves.  Weinberg lets out a one-bar drum fill and then Clemons lets rip.  With the band back at full tilt, they repeat an eight-bar motif to fade.

A tour de force from first to last, Thunder Road sounds every bit as urgent today as it did when it was committed to tape at The Record Plant in New York in the spring of 1975.  The arrangement and production – “Dylan as produced by Phil Spector” in the words of Nick Hornby – has not dated; the musicianship cannot be faulted; even Springsteen’s vocal (rarely his strongest point, and he admits he spends this particular song trying to emulate Roy Orbison) demonstrates atypical subtlety and nuance alongside the more usual power and bombast.

Springsteen achieved his ambition:

I wanted to make a record that would sound like Phil Spector. I wanted to write words like Dylan. I wanted my guitar to sound like Duane Eddy.

Yet the song contains the same central themes – a boy, a girl, a car, the symbolic freedom offered by the open road, an aspiration to leave a stagnating small town and a burning faith in the redemptive power of rock music – at which Cars And Girls sneered.  Our man yearns for maturity but his chosen means of escape – his car and his guitar – remain the same tools by which many teenagers seek to attain eternal youth.  Yet even McAloon would surely recognise that, whatever its subject matter, Thunder Road is a truly great record – fantastic music with a great story, realised spectacularly.

Thunder Road’s ambiguous conclusion suggests that even its author was uncertain of where our anti-hero was heading or how things would work out.  The released studio version ends with the roar of confidence; yet Springsteen’s acoustic re-workings of the story end with a softer-sung intention imbued with the fear that he’s never going to win anything.

In Springsteen’s own words:

[The Born To Run album] really dealt with faith and a searching for answers.  I laid out a set of values, a set of ideas, intangibles like faith and hope, belief in friendship and in a better way…In some ways I suppose it is [young man’s music], but also a good song takes years to find itself.  When I go back and play Thunder Road… I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there’s innocence contained in you but there’s also innocence in the process of being lost.  And that was the country at the time I wrote that music.

I wrote that music immediately preceding the end of the Vietnam war, when that feeling swept the country.  A part of me was interested in music which contained that innocence, the Spector stuff, a lot of the Fifties and Sixties rock’n’roll, but I myself wasn’t one of those people.  I realised I wasn’t one of my heroes, I was something else and I had to take that into consideration.  So when I wrote that music and incorporated a lot of the things I loved from those particular years, I was also aware that I had to set in place something that acknowledged what had happened to me and everybody else where I lived.

A few months after Cars And Girls‘ release in 1988, Bruce Springsteen would share the bill on Amnesty International’s Human Rights Now world tour with Tracy Chapman.  Her biggest hit concerned a boy, a girl, a car, the symbolic freedom offered by the open road and an aspiration to leave a stagnating small town…

You got a fast car:
I want a ticket to anywhere -
Maybe we make a deal,
Maybe together we can get somewhere.
Any place is better.
Starting from zero, got nothing to lose
Maybe we’ll make something,
But me, myself, I got nothing to prove.
You got a fast car:
And I got a plan to get us out of here…
We won’t have to drive too far -
Just ‘cross the border and into the city.
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living…
I remember when we were driving, driving in your car,
The speed so fast I felt like I was drunk;
City lights lay out before us,
And your arm felt nice wrapped ’round my shoulder,
And I had a feeling that I belonged,
And I had a feeling I could be someone…
You got a fast car:
But is it fast enough so [we] can fly away?
[We] gotta make a decision -
[We] leave tonight or live and die this way.

Some things undeniably hurt more – much more – than cars and girls.  But in Popworld, if they’re all you’ve got, nothing else matters more.

Listen to the studio version of Thunder Road:

t’Internet allows us also to witness Wings For Wheels, from February 1975, containing a number of significant lyrical differences – among other things, bootlegs from early 1975 show that Mary had previously been named Christine, Chrissy and, as in this case, Angelina:

There are literally hundreds of versions of Thunder Road available but above all the Minister beseeches you to listen to this magical harmonica, piano and glockenspiel-only version from the Live 1975-85 box set recorded on 18 October 1975 at the Roxy Theatre, West Hollywood: